01-26-2020, 06:00 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Punatic007
No problem Paul, I find this to be a very perplexing situation. So far since the flu in the USA is more lethal, I wonder if it's simply the high contagion rate as the reasoning behind all the shut downs in China? What makes this virus so special? Shutting down major cities and travel is a really big deal especially in China.
"For example, in 1918 there was a worldwide outbreak of the swine flu that killed 50 million people. According to a review article published in BMC Medicine, the R0 value of the 1918 pandemic was estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.8. But when the swine flu, or H1N1 virus, came back in 2009, its R0 value was between 1.4 and 1.6, report researchers in the journal Science. The existence of vaccines and antiviral drugs made the 2009 outbreak much less deadly." https://www.healthline.com/health/r-noug...alculation
R0=number of people an infected person will infect. So if a "normal" flu year has an R0 of around 1, a pandemic between 1.4 and 2.8. This corona virus has an R0 of between 2.6 and 3.8 (this estimate has been changing daily) but there is no vaccine, or herd immunity, and antiviral drugs do not work. Shutting down cities is the only tool China has to lower the R0.
ETA UPDATE: the R0 for this disease could be as high as 5.47: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/...3.916395v1